The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman (The Surgeon of Crawthorne in the UK) is true crime through the side door. It tells the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary and the crucial role a murderer played in it. That juxtaposition alone is pure gold.

The book is exhaustively researched but doesn’t read like it, which I deeply respect. The writing is so lovely, so eloquent. I want to dress up when I read Simon Winchester, and put out the good china.

When I was in college, I asked my parents for the two-volume, compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary for Christmas one year. I was in a Friday afternoon etymology discussion group that the philosophy professor in charge of it had named “The Society of Harmless Drudges,” and the OED was our bible.

Many years later, reading this book, I was astonished at the many years and many contributors that went into the making of the original edition. One of the most unusual contributors, as Winchester explores, lived in a mental institution after having been judged criminally insane.

The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest of all dictionaries, and, as it turns out, a large percentage of its original entries were composed by a murderer living in an asylum for the criminally insane. It is an extraordinary story, and one that could easily become sensationalist or maudlin; this one never does. Relatively slim and entirely accessible, the book wears its erudition lightly; Simon Winchester narrates with seemingly effortless scholarship and a distinctly English offhand charm, deftly balancing tones that run the gamut from dark to winsome. The Professor and the Madman is a paean to the majesty of… show more.